Of Stefano Di Cecio
PISTOIA – Pistoia welcomed Adelmo Cervi, son of Aldo, one of the seven Cervi brothers shot by the fascists on 28 December 1943 in Reggio Emilia. Adelmo, 80 years old, was present last night at the Hitachi company club where the documentary film based on his book “My Seven Fathers” was screened.
And it was precisely at the Hitachi club that we interviewed him: an interview that starts from the post-war period and continues until today. “Let’s fight for ideals, solidarity, what unites us. Our task is to bring justice, not to argue” says Adelmo.
Below is the interview.
What is your most vivid family memory? I was four months old when they shot my father. So my memories start after the war, after the Liberation. I remember that there was still a part of the house burned down. The fascists, after having surrounded it, had burned it when they arrived to get him and his brothers out. The most important part has been fixed, even if there weren’t many willing to rebuild the Cervi house. For a few years it was quite tough, also because there was a family left without men to work the land, my mother, my aunts. No one had been able to approach the house because it was a house of rebels, a house of bandits controlled by the fascists.
Is there a way to preserve historical memory and pass it down to today’s generations? Memory… I’ve been traveling around all my life, carrying my family’s history, my thoughts. Now I find it more and more difficult. Memory is important if it guides us to build something good in the present.
What do you think of the current government right-wing? I think that what is happening to us is not a last minute story, it is a long story, it is a story of mistakes that we have always made. After the Liberation there was a strong air of recovery among a part of the people. I don’t like populists wherever they come from. Populism has been misused on both the right and the left and this is a price we pay because we have not passed on the right ideals to build a different world. Those who gave their lives wanted a world of justice, of freedom, they wanted every person to be free to build, to be able to express themselves and decide their own destiny together with others. As a communist I want to say that there have also been mistakes on the left, the right does its job and we have not been able to do ours.
Do you see it as a glimmer of hope and change? Look, I see the glimmer in the young people I meet in schools. Honestly, I’m tired of going around and only seeing gray heads, I want to see blond heads too. I want the story of the Cervi brothers to be known. These are the ideals that you must carry forward, talking about the Resistance, talking about what we have experienced. These are the reasons why even today we must always be ready to fight the enormous injustices that exist in this world.
Are you still interested in memory? Many weren’t interested even when my father gave his life, when he left with his group he had to do it secretly, they were a minority. Only afterwards, in recent times has the War of Liberation been idolized. My father was not only an anti-fascist but he was also an anti-capitalist because he understood that capitalism was an unjust society.
Did your father believe in the possibility of improving his own life and that of others? When they tell me today “these are hard times” I have to say they were hard times for my father too and even before. My father and his brothers were sharecroppers, they had to work the land to feed a family of more than 20 adults and children. This with half of the harvest, because the other half belonged to the owner of the land. But what united peasant families was human solidarity. My ideals are those for which my father and thousands of other comrades fought. Democracy is an important thing and we must use democracy seriously. Use solidarity to understand the real problems and build a world in which there is a human relationship between people.
Today everything is more accessible, are we perhaps more prisoners than before? Free to obey the powerful around us. We should unite on fundamental things like freedom and justice. We have had an important weapon for some time and it is the Constitution. I think we should take back the Constitution and the values for which this new Italy was born, which was never really born. All the Italian parties wrote the Constitution. That’s why I sometimes say, we have a gun and always have, why haven’t we used it? We find a thousand reasons to argue but let’s focus on the important things that give us the opportunity to unite.
